I’m not one for business books. They are, as a rule, reductive, shallow, formulaic, and hokey. So imagine my surprise when I came to Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business and found that it was…nah, not what you’re thinking. Let’s just say that it didn’t stir my skeptical heart. […]
I’ve got no objectivity when it comes to Laurence Wareing. I’ll just say that up front. Even though I believe I’d be celebrating the appearance of Celtic Blessings and Celtic Saints into the world without knowing who the author was, I do recognize that knowing the soul behind the books made the reading that much […]
To translate the Johannine epistles (1, 2, & 3 John in the Bible) is to be adrift in a sea of love and antichrists. You get the sense that the community receiving these letters is tragically torn and needs the stern reminding of this elder to remember who they are and to learn how to […]
The Third Letter of John A translation by Alex Joyner From the elder to the beloved Gaius, whom I love in the Truth. My beloved friend, I pray that you prosper in all things and in good health, just as your soul prospers. What joy I felt when our emissaries came to bear witness to […]
Here’s an evergreen commandment—“Don’t take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” (Ex. 20:7) It’s one of the top 10 from Sinai and it’s most often invoked when someone believes they have breached it—say when they let a juicy God-based epithet fly in front of the preacher. How many times have I been […]
This review originally appeared on The Englewood Review of Books and is republished with permission. The experiments that Gifty, a Stanford PhD candidate, conducts have the illusion of being about control. A pioneer in the field of optogenetics, the young Ghanaian-American researcher is using illuminated neural pathways to understand the brains of mice—particularly brains with […]
In 1929, William Faulkner had a keen sense that it was all falling in of its own weight. When he published The Sound and the Fury, now recognized as an American classic, it confused folks more than wowed them. The first section, written from the perspective of Benjy Compson, the intellectually-challenged son of a white […]
The First Letter of John A translation by Alex Joyner* That which was from the beginning is also, believe it!, that which we have heard, what we have seen with our own eyes, the Logos of Life—we beheld and held it with these trembling hands. The Life was revealed and we have seen and bear […]
Willa Cather can make you believe that Nebraska is a little more idyllic than your particular piece of America. Prairie flowers bloom near fields of waving wheat. Sturdy immigrant farmers build sturdy farmhouses and some residents install hammocks on the upper porch to sleep out under the stars on summer evenings. Even the fierce winter […]
While the Washington football team and the Cleveland baseball team were both undergoing public struggles about the appropriateness of their nicknames, my own favorite baseball team, the Texas Rangers,was called out by several national columnistsfor a similar soul-searching. Theodore Roosevelt, (yes, THAT Teddy Roosevelt) made the case for both sides back before there was even […]
